The 13th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (CRITIS 2018) was held at the Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania between September 24 and 26, 2018. The conference was organized by the Lithuanian Energy Institute and Vytautas Magnus University.

CRITIS 2018 continued the tradition of presenting innovative research and exploring new challenges in the field of critical (information) infrastructure protection (C(I)IP) and fostering the dialogue between all C(I)I stakeholders. CRITIS 2018 aimed at bringing together researchers and professionals from academia, C(I)I operators, industry, defence sector and governmental organisations working in the field of the security of critical (information) infrastructures.

In 2018, the conference contained the following keynote lectures:

Protecting Critical Information Infrastructure on National and EU level – Lithuanian approachEdvinas Kerza (Vice-Minister, Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of Lithuania),

Bridging the gap between ICS and corporate IT security: Finding common culture and viewsby Stefan Lüders (Head of Computer Security at CERN, Switzerland) – see presentation in pdf,

Comparison of Nordic and Continental Europe Grids from the Cyber Resilience Perspectiveby Hayretdin Bahşi (Center for Digital Forensics and Cyber Security, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia) – see presentation in pdf.

The main theme of the conference concerned the challenges for the energy sector as national and multi-national critical infrastructure. Two special sessions took addressed the technological and policy challenges for energy operators, policymakers and other stakeholders. These sessions were introduced by invited speakers:

The Necessity of Synchronization of the Baltic States’ Electricity Network with the European Systemby Ramūnas Bikulčius (Head of Strategy and Research Division, Litgrid, Lithuania) – see presentation in pdf,

Building a network of trust among European utilities to foster proactive security though info sharingby Massimo Rocca (Enel Security representative and EE-ISAC Chair, Enel, Italy) – see presentation in pdf,

Panel discussions led by the session chairman Marcelo Masera (European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Petten, the Netherlands) between these invited speakers and interactions with the audience stimulated the long-term debate between energy domain stakeholders and the research community.

As in previous years, the Program Committee received a large set of paper submissions. The Program Committee provided insightful reviews and comments to the submitters of 51 papers. At least three, on average 4.6 independent reviews per submission took place resulting in the acceptance of 16 full papers. Another three submissions were accepted as short papers. Accepted papers were presented covering five topics (5 sessions):

Securing Internet of Things and Industrial Control Systems (some presentations in pdf are available, click to see),

Need and tool sets for Industrial Control System security (some presentations in pdf are available, click to see),

Advancements in governance and resilience of Critical Infrastructures (some presentations in pdf are available, click to see),

and short papers (some presentations in pdf are available, click to see).

The post-proceedings of CRITIS 2018 will be published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

To stimulate international collaboration and exchange of ideas, the program chairs invited work-in-progress projects for a short presentation and poster session.

There were three candidates for the Young CRITIS Award (YCA) 2018: Luca Faramondi, Davide Fauri, and Anamitra Pal. The intention of the YCA is building a virtual international community that allows junior researchers in the C(I)I domain to interact and network with peers and experienced researchers in the C(I)I domain. This stimulates faster and better research results and may also lead to further joint international research. The fifth YCA was presented by Marco Santarelli (Scientific Director ReS On Network, Italy) as chair of the YCA Commission to Anamitra Pal (Pal Lab, SECEE, Arizona State University) for his contribution to the paper Health Monitoring of Critical Power System Equipments using Identifying Codes.

Around 70 participants from 22 countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States of America) contributed through their presentations, discussions and expertise in establishing the state-of-the-art in the field.

Few photos of the conference were captured and now being displayed in the Gallery section of the website.

Organizing a conference like CRITIS entails an effort that is largely invisible to the participants. We, therefore, want to acknowledge the personal commitment of the local organizing team, general chairs, the contributions by the keynote speakers and invited speakers, as well as the support of the host organizations Vytautas Magnus University and the Lithuanian Energy Institute. The program committee chairs express their gratitude to the Technical Program Committee members who volunteered their services and devoted considerable time in preparing insightful reviews and comments to the authors of the papers. Together with the contributions to the discussions and interactions between all conference participants, this resulted in a very successful and stimulating CRITIS 2018.